


Why Did I Go Before You?

by Lordki



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood, Depression, Flashbacks, M/M, Oneshot, Post-Winter Soldier, Suicide, Unhealthy Relationships, i wrote this drunk and angry, pure angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 05:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2012910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lordki/pseuds/Lordki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s 4 in the morning and Steve Rogers is kneeling on the floor of a motel room in the outskirts of Las Vegas. There’s a piercing sound in his ears and his hands are shaking. Someone is speaking to him but he can’t hear the words, and his vision is blurring the outline of his hands. The police lights from the parking lot flash around him and he feels his mind start to slip away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why Did I Go Before You?

     It’s 4 in the morning and Steve Rogers is kneeling on the floor of a motel room in the outskirts of Las Vegas. There’s a piercing sound in his ears and his hands are shaking. Someone is speaking to him but he can’t hear the words, and his vision is blurring the outline of his hands. The police lights from the parking lot flash around him and he feels his mind start to slip away.

  
  
    At age twelve, he had his nose broken by bullies behind the grocery store. He’d thought he was going to die. But a friendly pair of hands pulled him to his feet and held him in place, brushing him off and asking him if he was alright. That was Bucky Barnes. Older, smarter, tougher. Golden. Steve wanted to be just like him.

    When they were teenagers, Steve tried to stand up for himself and ended up with a deep stab wound to the gut. Bucky kept him company in the hospital and they listened to baseball games as the weather grew unbearably warm. Bucky was growing tall and strong, and that lopsided little boy smile had somehow become a charming smirk.

     Steve healed slowly. They spent hours talking and staying awake. Sometimes the nurses would shoo him away and Bucky would sneak back in to sit in the old chair beside Steve. They covered all topics. Where they wanted to go— France, or Spain maybe, somewhere with history, with real roots. Bucky talked about moving out to the country and buying a farm. Steve laughed at the image of his friend in overalls.

     They talked about women, or girls. Steve held his breath while Bucky discussed a girl he was seeing. His eyes sparkled when he said her name and Steve already felt the slipping tug of being forgotten.

     A few months later Bucky and the girl were through and he took Steve for walks, stopping whenever Steve needed air. Sometimes they would stand side by side, Steve wheezing slightly and Bucky running a distracted hand over his shoulder. They were silent in these times, and Bucky looked at Steve for long stretches without glancing away.

     When they were adults, or close enough, the war was on and Bucky was going. Steve’s heart skipped beats as Bucky told him his marching orders. They said goodbye on a crowded rush of a day and later Steve found he could barely remember any of it, just the sensation of being cut in half. He searched desperately for a way into the army.

     The first time Bucky was declared MIA, Steve went after him. Found him, tortured and hallucinating, in a Hydra facility deep behind enemy lines. Dragged him out of the fray, brought him back to safety. They shared many quiet moments over maps and glasses of whiskey and Bucky would again stare at Steve without speaking. Steve would laugh or smile or look away.

     Nights after meals they would stand outside and Bucky would smoke if he could and Steve would talk to him about New York. Bucky dodged the questions and asked his own. Was Steve healthy, were they treating him alright, who was the idiot who put him on a stage? Steve had no answer but wry smiles.

     “Fuck ‘em,” Bucky said forcefully one night as they watched the stars just outside camp, “fuck all of them.”

     “Why?” Steve was still half laughing.

     Bucky turned to him and his eyes were cold, “They wanted to use you, Steve. To turn you into their little puppet, put you on strings and make you dance. Don’t let them. Ever.”

     “Buck, it wasn’t that bad.”

     “Oh, yes it was,” Bucky gave him such a hard glare that Steve felt guilty, “You’re your own hero now. You’re Captain America. Don’t let anybody tell you what to do.”

     “Alright, alright, Buck,” he made a pacifying motion with his hands until the sharp edge faded from Bucky’s eyes, “I won’t.”

     “Promise.”

     “I promise.”

     “Good,” Bucky looked away.

     Steve knew it then. Bucky was silhouetted in the moonlight, cigarette casting a small glow. He was rougher around the edges than he had once been. He was a soldier now, a real soldier. Steve watched the way the shadows played on his face. Bucky had, as always, grown up without him. Steve said goodnight and left him standing there on the hill, where he wouldn’t be able to see the shaking of Steve’s hands or hear the hitch in his breath.

     The next time Bucky was declared MIA there was an asterisk followed by the words _presumed dead_ and Steve could not go after him.

 

     On the motel floor, Steve is aware of someone calling his name. He hears his own voice ask in a faint whisper, “Natasha?”

     She is kneeling beside him but he can’t bring himself to turn his head.

     He’s still staring at his own hands. In the periphery of his vision, people in blue uniforms are surrounding him and bending down over something on the floor.

     He can’t remember what is happening.

 

     When Bucky had come back, it was as someone else. Not Bucky Barnes at all. A soldier. An unknown soldier. Steve had tried reason, tried pleading, tried giving up, and Bucky had put three bullets in his chest. But _someone_ had pulled Steve, bleeding and broken, out of the waters of the Potomac and left him breathing on the banks.

     In the following weeks, Steve had been furious with himself for not saving Bucky. They lost him then, the unknown soldier, in the crushing mass of the American continent. He disappeared without a trace and Steve was left trying to guess where the ghost of his friend might go.

     He tracked him all over the country before losing him again. Reports of sightings stopped and the hard-earned leads went cold. Bucky was gone.

 

    “Steve, oh my God, Steve,” Natasha is holding him by the shoulders, “what happened?”

     His hands come into focus and they’re red. They’re red and glistening.

     “Steve, hey, look at me,” she grasps his face by the chin and turns him toward her. He’s aware of something wet rolling down the side of his face, from his hair to his chin. His mind works hard to understand.

     “I…” he says slowly, in measured words he has to concentrate hard to pronounce, “I found him.”

 

    Sam Wilson had warned Steve about the kind of trauma Bucky would suffer if his memories came back. They argued, not that it mattered. There was nothing they could do.

     “We don’t know what they did to him,” Sam said at 11:30 one night, as Steve sat in his living room, “you took a seventy year nap, he woke up every few years to live his nightmares in real time.”

     “You want me to hide the truth from him? Pretend he’s not who he is? He’s my best friend.”

     “Steve, he’s been fucked up in ways we can’t even imagine. We don’t even know if his brain is intact, if he’s even capable of remembering—”

     “He is.”

     “Okay,” Sam waved a hand in frustration, “say he is. Say you tell him everything and he remembers. Then he has to live with that guilt, and what Hydra did to him, and you expect him to just… be okay? Steve, you sound crazy.”

     “Bucky’s strong, he can handle it.”

     “No one could handle that.”

     “You don’t know him like I do.”

     “No, I don’t _want him back_ like you do.”

     “That’s great, Sam,” Steve couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice, “That’s real helpful.”

     “Steve, don’t do this.”

     Sighing hard, Steve made a move for the door. Sam blocked him, grabbing his arm and leaning in.

     “Don’t do this to him. If he remembers… if it goes bad…”

     Steve wrenched his arm free with little effort. He stormed out of the apartment and did not look back.

 

    The motel floor is wet, spongy carpet seeping red where Steve is kneeling. Natasha is speaking in hushed tones, saying something into her earpiece, leaning her head against Steve’s shoulder.

     “But I found him,” Steve whispers to himself, and the scene resets.

 

    He’d tracked Bucky, finally, to a motel in the desert outside Vegas. Bucky was alone and unarmed save for a single knife. Steve was alone and unarmed save for a stack of manila folders containing every scrap of Bucky he could compile.

     Steve knocked on the door and Bucky allowed him in, setting the knife on the bedside table. They both stared at it until Bucky rubbed his eyes with his flesh-and-blood hand. He sat down on the bed.

     “Please leave,” the soldier said, and it was so unexpected that Steve couldn’t think of a single reply.

     “I don’t want to see you,” Bucky continued, “I don’t want to remember you. Already, I see… I see these flashes of you, and me, or whoever I was. I don’t want it, so just leave me alone.”

     “Bucky,” Steve began, and his voice wavered as he said, “listen, I need you to listen. Remember me. Remember that time you saved my life in the alley off our street. Remember when I found you in Germany. Please, Bucky, you don’t understand. Everyone else is gone, we’re the only ones left. We’re the only ones… you’re all I’ve got, now. You always were, but now it’s different. I can be here for you now, I can take care of us both, and I promise, I promise it’ll be okay. I’ll take care of everything, just… please. Try to remember.”

     Steve took a slow breath, the effort of restraint making him tense.

     Bucky had no answer for a long time. Steve stood over him, waiting.

     When the silence had stretched to a breaking point, Steve closed his eyes and sat on the end of the bed, leaving space between them.

     They sat in the same place until Steve finally stood and left, unable to think of anything better to say. He resolved to get a room at the motel and come back in the morning. And the day after. He would return as many times as it took.

     He left the files.

    It took a week. Steve would come in, sit silently until he felt he’d stayed long enough, and then retreat into the morning light. The files went untouched on the bedside table. On the seventh day, Bucky startled Steve by speaking in a calm, even voice.

     “You need me to do this,” he said as though reciting a fact learned in school, staring at the opposite wall with a faraway expression.

     Steve couldn’t tell him no, because it was true.

     “Okay,” Bucky said, and then lapsed into silence once more.

    Steve found him the next day. He called his name, quietly at first, then louder, the way a child calls for a lost parent. Desperately. Furiously. He dove to the floor and gathered the limp form in his arms and screamed for help.

     When help finally comes, first responders dialed on a landline phone with bloody, shaking fingers, they are far too late.

 

    It’s 4 in the morning and Steve Rogers is kneeling on the floor of a motel room in the outskirts of Las Vegas. His hands and face are coated in blood and he can’t seem to catch his breath. Scattered around him are photographs and papers outlining the life and times of James Buchanan Barnes. Letters they wrote each other. Promotion notices. Other useless pieces of history.

     Someone is putting a coat around his shoulders even though the dry air is warm.

     “Jesus,” says a strange voice, a few yards outside the door, “is that his arm?”

     “It was, I think.”

     Steve releases a breath that’s more of a cry. There’s a gentle pressure against his cheek as Natasha begins to sponge away drying blood with a towel.

     “He’s that guy from DC, then?” one of the voices outside continues.

     “Looks like.”

     “And is that—”

     “ _Shhh._ ”

     They pause in conversation for a moment. Steve’s eyes dart distractedly over Natasha’s face. She seems steady but there are dark streaks where her eyeliner has run just beneath her eyes. She picks up Steve’s hands one by one, reverently wiping them as clean as she can. Blood is stuck in the creases of his palm.

     “I’m gonna clean this up, Steve,” she mutters.

     Steve doesn’t know whether she means his hands or something else.

     “Natasha?”

     She looks up.

     He can’t form the words but they must show in his eyes. Her expression changes and she shakes her head at him.

     “Don’t, don’t think like that, Steve. It’s not your fault.”

     But there are tears now, after seventy years, there are tears and Steve is trying to stand up. Natasha pulls him back down and wraps her arms around him. He buries his face in her shoulder as her jacket slides off his back.

     “Natasha,” he says, but the name is a choked gasp, “Natasha, tell me… tell me he died in the war.”

     She holds him tight, rocking back and forth on her knees as he grasps at her sweater. Her hand runs over his hair.

     “He did.”

     “Please…” he’s not sure if he’s still speaking out loud.

     “He died in the war,” she says gently, pressing her cheek into his forehead, “he fell, and you lost him then. He died in the war.”

     Steve closes his eyes and tries to believe her.


End file.
